As shown in the below video, Counter-Strike: GO players on the Reflex Gamers servers can pick up a cartridge found in a modded version of the Office level and throw it in a recreated SNES model hooked up to the screen hanging on the wall. Next, they can pick up a virtual controller and play a thinly veiled two-player Nintendo rip-off called Super Mareo Bruhs. Bruhs comes complete with goomba stomping and coin collecting, and players can enjoy the game-within-a-game while utterly ignoring the incoming grenades and live fire from the encroaching counter-terrorists.

The mod has an admirable devotion to verisimilitude, from the power light on the in-game SNES to controllers with buttons that actually depress as you control the game from your own keyboard. Video uploader skwumpy writes in the description that the mod itself took "months of playing with CS:GO modding" and "a little bit of maaaaagic" to get interactive video and audio to run on an in-game screen (and an engine) that is not designed for it. "The way it works is crazy!!"

As amazing as this mod is to us, it's probably even more incredible to our fifth-dimensional alien overlords who are currently astounded that people playing inside their Earth simulation can now play yet another game while they're also playing the Counter-Strike: GO sub-simulation on their virtual computers. In any case, it beats playing Second Second Life.

Super Mareo Bruhs in Counter-Strike: GO (NSFW language).

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl